Two enormously productive UK musicians, Hawkins and Hutchings, join together (alongside bass hotshot Neil Charles, aka Ben Marc) for this intriguing album which takes its inspiration from West Indian poet Derek Walcott's famous Nobel Prize acceptance speech: "Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole. "Consequently, Break A Vase at first appears fragmentary and illogical, but taken as a whole and heard multiple times, it has a beautiful, crystalline logic to it; and it’s as intelligent a musical interpretation of Walcott’s quotation as one could wish for.

As ever, Hawkins thinks elliptically, both in his piano playing/composition and his sequencing of the album – turbulence follows the pacific, locomotion contrasts with the inert. The title track is a mere 89 seconds long and is a solo piano piece and doesn’t appear until halfway through the album; almost a hidden track, you might say. It’s followed by what might be the standout cut here, the skittering ‘Chaplin in Slow Motion’. Elsewhere, ‘Stamped Down, Or Shovelled’ seems to hark back to Henry Threadgill with its quirky time signature while the turbulent ‘Generous Souls’ features one of the best, and most fearsome, Hutchings solos I’ve heard in quite a time. The juddering "Stride Rhyme Gospel" is excellent too. Interestingly, Hawkins, Davis and Charles played with Anthony Braxton on his Standards tour of 2019-20 and it seems that the trio learned a lot from the master, Hawkins especially. More please, and soon.